The Home Friend 1909: Sears, Roebuck and Company

House Plans

The Sears Catalog is long gone now, and at the end they were certainly not selling houses, but as you can see from this 1909 ad in the Home Friend they had a running concern for them at that time. How many of you live in a house built with Sears home plans?

The Curtis Company, Clinton, Iowa

While Sears was making plans, two hundred miles away in Clinton, Iowa the Curtis Lumber Company was churning out wooden bullseye rosette blocks that you might have seen in some of those Sears houses. I’m sure many of us have seen them even in old houses today. It’s hard to believe that at one time Clinton, Iowa, a town on the Mississippi River, was known as a mill town rather than the industrial city it is now.

Between the late 1850’s and 1900, the Clinton area was regarded as the sawmill capital of the nation. Huge log rafts were floated down river from Wisconsin and Minnesota, cut into lumber at Clinton, then shipped to growing communities east, west, north and south via the river and the railroads.

I have recently been going through some of my old newspapers and found another article about the last days of Bordeaux, WA. This one is from the Daily Olympian dated 26 Sept 1941. I scanned it so I could send it to my uncle in California who used to live in this logging town, but also for my readers so they can understand what happened when a mill town runs out of marketable logs.

Are you looking for more articles written by this blog about the old mill town of Bordeaux? You might want to do a search here using the Lijit search box to the right, or click on these previous stories. Thanks for visiting iPentimento today!